mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

Unverified Voracity Goes Eeee Once More

More meta UFR stuff. Biological fun fact: because of Chris Chelios, Mike Comrie, and my loose affiliation with the Wings due to a childhood spent in then hockey-free Colorado, I migrated my NHL fandom to the Edmonton Oilers a while back. How's that working out? Just fantastic, thanks.

One of the compensations of following the sort of team that would sign 70-year-old Nikolai Khabibulin to a four-year deal without giving him a physical is that the blogging community around the team is spectacularly good. I've read Lowetide and MC79 for years and have just stumbled on the SBNation Oilers blog. It has a post called "Groupthink, Confirmation Bias, Hockey Fans And Microstats." I put in in the feed reader three times.

Anyway, here's UFR motivation in a nutshell:

In the world of sports fans, confirmation biases abound. It's impossible for individual fans to record, catalog, process, analyze and interpret the results of hundreds of independent events occurring constantly throughout a game, but it's much easier to pick out those events and sequences of events that support their conclusions. Any hockey fan that has sat silently shaking their head while the crowd piles on an undeserving player recognizes this immediately. It's a powerful psychological force, especially in a setting like sports. Fans can confirm their biases for themselves and immediately fall back on thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of fellow fans to confirm what they already know.

It seems that the Michigan fan's groupthink these days has been pretty accurate. Most of the people who have come in for internet horsewhippings have subsequently fluttered in and out of the lineup (Mike Williams, JT Floyd, Obi Ezeh, Jonas Mouton, Dorrestein/Huyge platoon) or been moved to less terrifying spots for their athleticism (Kovacs). Even so, it's nice to have UFRs around for when it's unjustified, like when Steve Breaston was getting killed for dropping about the same number of balls as any other receiver on the team.

And yes, I will UFR the Ohio State game, probably about a week after spring practice finishes up.

Right, I forgot about the pablum. So Da'Sean Butler suffered an ugly ACL tear in his Final Four game against Duke and then had that uncomfortable moment with Huggins.

"Everybody has to buy in, and you have to get the right people," Butler said, referring to Beilein's offense, which requires discipline and precise shooting. "You've got to get the absolute right people for that system, because if you have even one person that doesn't understand or doesn't care to understand, a cancer on the team of some sort, then it can throw everything off, honestly.

"The system works. That's the best system I've ever been part of in my life as far as just running an offense. It suited me so well. I think everybody kind of gets into, you've got to get all these five-star and whatever recruits, and for him, you just need to find the right players who can obviously make shots, but who will work hard. And if you find that right group, and not like prima donnas, it could be a very good system."

I guess that's nice but I bet the "whole lot of nothing" quote Butler dropped a few days ago resulted in a sharp thwack on the head and a reminder to never say anything that could be construed as not wildly positive. On the other hand, Huggins is still running Beilein's 1-3-1 regularly. That does seem meaningful.

“I don’t put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on any one year, but clearly this year was a year we hoped for better and certainly lost a little bit of momentum in terms of our improvement,” Brandon said. “But that doesn’t detract from my belief that going forward we can regain that momentum, and our program is going to get bigger and better and stronger when we get those practice facilities in, and we do some things that will afford us to be able to recruit a little more aggressively. It’s going to help both those programs a lot."

He manages to strike a balance between acknowledging things have been disappointing and offer public support of his coaches in response to the machine-gunned "when can we fire this guy?" questions he appears to field 24/7.

That comes from an article that focuses on the future of the basketball program with a couple of Brandon quotes that give an indication of what the U has planned for Crisler:

“We need wider concourses, we need more restrooms, we need better amenities in terms of food service and service opportunities for our fans,” Brandon said. “We need to re-seat the bowl, think differently about the kind of seating that we use and probably put in some kind of club-seating opportunities to give special experiences to people who are willing to take advantage of those.

“Probably come up with a different game plan as to where we put the media and just how we professionalize that arena.”

Emphasis mine. That sort of talk would be an anethma about Michigan Stadium—though it is basically undergoing the same process—but is welcome in reference to Crisler, which is what you'd get if you took Joe Louis Arena and turned off half the lights. If Brandon can fulfill his goal of having the broadcaster who declared Crisler one of the worst in the country return to eat crow*, Michigan's facilities renovations will be essentially complete. The last thing to do would be another Yost renovation that brought in video boards and some other things.

*(This has to be Bilas, right? I imagine this happened during one of his many defenses of Tommy Amaker.)

This was a Malcolm in the Middle plot. MVictors has detailed Michigan's tumultuous 1909 on his blog and in HTTV, and now we have a postscript thanks to mgouser and extremely unusual person Alaska Hokie. Michigan QB Joy Miller was the Demar Dorsey of his day, except with academic laziness (the classes: he had none) substituting for juvenile robberies. He was eventually booted from the team and ended up cleaning pots for a horrible woman in Alaska. Or something close to that:

QUARTER BACK LOSES HIS MIND

Famous Football Player on the Wolverine Team is Located at Walla Walla Working as Laborer.

HIS MIND IS TOTAL BLANK

Disappeared Months Ago From His Home and All Trace of Him Has Up to the Present Been Lost.

WALLA WALLA, March 19.—James Miller, the famous quarterback of the Michigan team last year, who has been missing from his home for several months, was located in this city yesterday working as a laborer. His mind is a total blank and he is quite unable to recognize his friends. He was elected to the captaincy of the Wolverine team for next season.

Man-for-man, his isn't the most talented offense in the conference, but given the close-to-the-sweatervest approach at Ohio State and widespread inexperience at Penn State, I'd put my money on MSU leading the conference in scoring at a little over 30 points per game. Just like last year, though, part of that will be out of necessity, to overcome the growing pains of a pair of new and/or ineffective cornerbacks, specifically, and a back seven in general that just doesn't have the horses to seriously contend for the conference title or one of the floating BCS slots. Assuming the offensive line holds up, though, the passing game will have a few eye-popping afternoons, and a Gator or Outback Bowl bid likely awaits after a borderline top-25 finish in the neighborhood of 8-4.

That is not within a game or two of .500, which will be its undoing. Spartan .500 gravity is one of the universe's most powerful forces.

I think this is the Da'Sean Butler quote Brian refers to above (from a Rick Reilly article about Huggins):

'"The first time I heard he was coming," remembers West Virginia's best player, Da'Sean Butler, "I was like, 'I'm getting ready to go to Michigan.' But I'm glad I didn't leave. It's been great. I'd be doing all kind of nothing right now."'

(But that was before Huggins tried to make out with him on national TV).

Does it say Deke on the paper? Are there any other Dekes in your class?

And yes, I will UFR the Ohio State game, probably about a week after spring practice finishes up.

LOL, due up the middle of next week, right?

RE: renovations. after basketball, i'd guess they make a plan for the outdoor track and then maybe Yost. a videoboard on the N or S wall of the arena would be sweet, but who knows what the load capacity is on those structures.

Having been an Islander fan since the late 70's (I lived north of NYC then), I feel your pain as, recently, both franchises have been dreck. Although, your team is (currently) 20 points further into the dreck than mine. =/

I am familiar with that territory. My introduction to the NHL came during the era when the Red Wings were constantly reminding people that there were actually teams that did not make the playoffs. (This was in the 16-of-21 years.)

In fact, that was basically how I learned about all Detroit sports: once upon a time, this team was really good, but now it's not. Don't worry, it'll get better. (The exception at the time was the Pistons, because they'd never really been good in the first place.)

Things are tough for the Oilers right now, but Edmonton does have a strong fan base and a solid history. Few franchises can point to the type of dominance that the Oilers (and the Islanders too, for that matter) displayed at one time.

Also, I can't stand the Flames, so therefore I like Edmonton as much as I can appreciate a Western Conference opponent.

I don't understand how the UFR's absolved Breaston. Do you mean numerically? Because that would suggest all plays are equal when clearly a dropped 65 yard TD is completely different from a dropped dump off on 2nd and 8.

Especially in Carr and DeBord's system, some few plays were very much more important than other plays. Some plays were set up through the game and even through the season. Those plays were usually channeled through the star players. That season Breaston was one of the stars. DeBord's gameplan frequently worked to get the star WR in single coverage, open down the field for a big play. When Breaston dropped or horribly misplayed those passes, the game was greatly affected in more ways that a -1 on a UFR reflected.

I'm not a Breaston hater but he appeared to be a poor choice for those over-the-shoulder downfield routes. Maybe we were just dealing with a small sample size in which Breaston looked uncharacteristically clueless. Or maybe this was a continuation of Carr's tendency to give his chosen seniors their day in the sun even if their skill set didn't warrant it.

Breaston's UFR score for the 2005 ND game may not reflect it but his lack of execution was a very large reason why UM lost. Hind sight is 20/20 and all but it strikes as likely that if Manningham were the target of those downfield passes, as he became later in the season, Michigan may have won.

Does that mean more RAWK and more "professional" "Hey, fans, WHO WANTS SOME PIZZZ-ZZZAAAAAA!?!?!?!?"

If anything, previous attempts to "professionalize" Crisler have come off as hokey and forced. I look forward to what Brandon can do to fix that. Reseating the bowl sounds like a marvelous, marvelous start.

Brandon's quote reagarding the improvements needed for Crisler Arena is a breath of fresh air. This great leader made the night game a reality and is not afraid to attack the necessary improvements needed for Michigan athletics. Maybe he will be able to land Brad Stevens following next season after he fires Beilein. Can you imagine Michigan being able to play man-to-man defense and rebound like Butler does? It would be beautiful to see a Michigan basketball team play physical again...it has been way too long.

When he said he'd be doing a whole lot of nothing, I took it to mean that his season would be over because Michigan wouldn't be in the Final Four with a hypothetical redshirt junior Butler. I don't think there's anything disrespectful about that.